Two members of the House Armed Services Committee, including South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson, are voicing concerns about the National Nuclear Security Administration’s decision to use The Aerospace Corporation to conduct a study on alternatives to the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility. In a March 25 letter to Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz obtained by NS&D Monitor, Wilson and Rep. Robert Brady (D-Pa.) said they were “perplexed” by the decision to select Aerospace, a Federally Funded Redearch and Development Center sponsored by the Air Force. “We fail to understand why DOE did not choose a FFRDC that has broader expertise in nuclear materials disposition and nuclear construction,” Wilson and Brady wrote. “This decision seems comparable to selecting a nuclear engineering company to review a satellite program at the Department of Defense.”
The lawmakers also suggested the company’s work on the B61-12 life extension program represents a conflict of interest. “We understand that Aerospace is currently providing engineering advisory support for the B61 gravity bomb life-extension program; a program whose funding would be boosted by redirecting funds intended for the MOX project to the nuclear weapons modernization program,” they wrote. “We question whether Aerospace can conduct a fair and unbiased study in light of its role in the B61 program.”
The Aerospace study was required by Congress in the Fiscal Year 2015 omnibus appropriations act, and is to provide a cost-benefit analysis of the MOX project versus one of four other options considered in a DOE study last year: dilution and disposition. DOE and NNSA attempted to put the project in cold standby last year due to rising costs but Congres balked, boosting funding for the program and requiring construction to continue. “Although alternatives are being studied, our hope is to stay the course on the MOX project and ensure that work continues,” Wilson and Brady wrote. “… Cancelling the MOX project and pursuiing any alterantive to it will have significant and far reaching consequences on jobs, the local and national economy, national security, our international obligations with Russia, and the future of the Savannah River Site.”
